


now and then

by mutterandmumble



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Dogs, Explicit Language, First Meetings, Fluff, Humor, M/M, largely unedited, we’re in romcom territory now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:28:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28661004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: He’s feeling less and less like a person and more a concept, like a vague shift of air that’s been trundled into someone’s secondhand clothing and pawned a dog somewhere along the way. The leash has become unbearably tight around his hand, so much so that it’s digging sharp into the flesh between his thumb and palm, so he takes his eyes off the path for a moment to unwind it which proves to be a big mistake because not a second later he’s hit by a sudden, sinking feeling of dread.And, incidentally, a very large dog.
Relationships: Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 92





	now and then

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone!!! So in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never actually played Hades. I’ve watched a smattering of a few playthroughs though- bits and pieces, because unfortunately most of the full ones that I’ve found are way longer than I’ve got the attention span for- but I really, really liked what I saw of it. The art is fantastic and the character design is like top notch and i never really grew out of my middle school mythology phase and also have a very unfortunate and enduring love of romcoms, and so here we are. 
> 
> I’ve also had some pretty bad writer’s block lately so I apologize for the slightly patchy, inconsistent quality of the writing style and then the poor pacing- I kept hitting my stride for like a paragraph and then falling out of it again for much, much longer, but we’re getting there. 
> 
> Anyways I hope you enjoy!!

Hypnos comes knocking at Thanatos’s door on a dull, hazy Sunday afternoon that feels so soft as to be surreal, the sort where the air moves thick and slow and the sunlight lies prone over the floor and Thanatos himself has hardly moved from the couch since he first sat there that morning with his coffee and a book, stuck fast in a free-time induced stupor. He’s entertained vague ideas of getting up every now and then but none of them have come to pass, and now the sun is still simmering away in the sky the shadow of a cloud is working its way across the floor and his consciousness is hung just far enough over the edge of sleep that the words on the page in front of him have taken to blending and blurring together into one unintelligible blot of ink.

And then comes the knock that shatters straight through his placid almost-rest and has him shooting up to his feet and swaying slightly, book sent tumbling to the floor and landing spine-up as the already weak binding at the edges finally gives in and tears itself from the glue. It’s a rather impressive display of histrionics considering that it’s a  _ book _ ; it must’ve learned from the best, Thanatos decides as his left foot, which has apparently fallen asleep at some point during his valiant attempt to empty his head of all conscious thought, gives out on him and sends the point of his knee careening directly into the corner of the coffee table. There is definitely plenty of  _ drama _ here, he thinks as he swears out loud with a vicious single-mindedness and the chorus of knocks at the door is joined by high-pitched, drawling laughter and- to Thanatos’s immediate and visceral horror- the frantic and rather  _ violent  _ yapping of a very small dog. 

That does it. Thanatos does not have it in him to deal with Hypnos’s nightmare of a dog today. He considers pretending that he’s not there, but Hypnos is calling for him now and knocking in triplicate- three sharp raps designed to break through the pleasant, mindless reverie of anyone within a fifty foot radius who may have been trying to actually  _ enjoy  _ their rare day off- and as it is Thanatos has already been pulled headlong back to the land of the living, so he shuts his eyes tight and sighs through his nose, flexes his fingers and taps at the side of his leg. Then he does all the deep-breathing exercises that he knows in as short a time as possible (which sort of defeats the purpose but it’s the thought that counts) and when that doesn’t do anything at all he knocks back the long-cold dregs of his coffee, presses a knuckle into his knee until the ache flares and subsides, then picks his book up and places it on the table and promptly resigns himself to his fate. 

He’s sure to do all his mourning for his day off in the time that it takes him to walk to the door which is an impressive enough amount because he’s dragging his feet and trying to make his outfit of gray sweatshirt and gray sweatpants and obviously unbrushed hair look somewhat presentable, but his apartment is only so big- which is to say not very big at all- so soon enough he reaches the door, and then before he comes to his senses and goes to hide out beneath his bed until Hypnos gives up and leaves (and takes that dog with him), he flings it open. 

“Hello, hello,” Hypnos singsongs as he waltzes past him, dog tucked beneath his arm and growling and squirming and snapping at anything and everything that offends him in some way, which includes but is not limited to the window, the empty paper plate on the counter, the vacuum cleaner in the corner, the dust on the vacuum cleaner in the corner, and of course Thanatos himself. “Love what you’ve done with the place. Very  _ colorful,  _ very  _ avant-garde _ , don’t you think Ares?”

This is a joke. Thanatos’s apartment has looked exactly the same for two years. As for  _ Ares _ \- Ares is hell in a handbasket, or else an uncooperative pomeranian who refused to have anything to do with hell unless it was slathered in peanut butter first. Ares is little and puffed-up and very, very angry, a hazard to ankles and unsuspecting siblings everywhere; Ares has it out for  _ Thanatos  _ in particular and he’s got the chewed-on shoes (expensive, those shoes were fucking  _ expensive _ ) to prove it. 

If Thanatos had known that Hypnos was coming over and that Ares would be with him, he would’ve hidden all of his good clothing and then dog-proofed the apartment- which essentially Hypnos-proofing the apartment, which is essentially baby-proofing the apartment- but as it is he had no clue because Hypnos  _ never  _ calls first; he’s prone to dropping in whenever he’d like, shucking his shoes off and welcoming himself to the meager stores of food that Thanatos keeps in his cabinets, sometimes cheating his way through a halfhearted game of go fish (Thanatos is frighteningly easy to cheat, he’s been told), sometimes picking through the bookshelf, sometimes taking a four hour nap on the couch. It’s annoying- it’s downright  _ infuriating _ \- and Thanatos is very embarrassed by the whole affair largely because he wouldn’t change it for the world. 

“If you had told me that you were coming over I would’ve cleaned up,” he says anyways, just to be petty, before shutting the door and taking a few hesitant steps in, as any room containing Ares is a room best regarded with caution and maybe a suit of armor or something of the sort if you’ve got the time for it. Something to protect your dignity and probably your fingers too because gods if that dog doesn’t  _ bite. _

“There’s nothing to clean up. There’s nothing _in_ here,” Hypnos tells him, and then he turns on his heel and proceeds to push the seething mass of slobber and teeth that he calls a dog into Thanatos’s arms. He recoils immediately, holds him out and away from his face and finds himself looking right into his eyes, which are filled to the brim with bloodlust and fury and the constant underlying plea for a _snack_ damn it, just a treat or a table scrap or a bit of turkey or something, _something_ , anything at all so long as he gets it _now_. Thanatos shudders; Ares continues to bear down on him with his incessant desire for food (and for terror, destruction and disasters upon this lands) because Ares can smell fear and life is a fucking nightmare. So it goes, Thanatos guesses. So it goes. 

“Why,” Thanatos begins as he narrowly avoids getting either licked on the cheek or bit on the nose, he’s not quite sure. “ _ Why  _ are you here.”

“Because!” Hypnos says, and then he twists his arms behind him to reach into the bag on his back, roots around for a second until he tugs out a blanket, unfolds it with a flourish, and then discards the bag with an unceremonious  _ plop  _ on the floor before turning on his heel and falling facefirst onto the couch, tugging the blanket around himself until only a stray sprig of one of his bone-white curls is visible. When he speaks again his voice is muffled, borderline unintelligible. “I need someone to take Ares on a walk, and  _ you  _ need to get out of your apartment. Bam! Perfect solution! Everyone wins!”    


Thanatos blinks. Ares paddles his paws through the air like he’s trying to waddle his way over to the cabinets through sheer force of will, and Thanatos is forced to adjust his grip  _ over  _ and  _ over  _ and  _ over  _ again so that he doesn’t fall. “I don’t want to take Ares on a walk,” he says, vaguely perplexed and more than a little overwhelmed. “Ares is  _ your  _ dog.  _ You  _ take him on a walk.”

“I can’t hear you,” Hypnos replies. “I’m asleep. And the leash is in my bag. Don’t forget the leash or else he’ll… or else he’ll try to fight… fight the...”

And to Thanatos’s horror, Hypnos trails off. Closer inspection- done carefully, with Ares tucked against his side and no sudden movements- shows that his face is squished up against the couch cushions, mouth wide open and a trail of drool ( _disgusting)_ trickling onto the upholstery. The sunlight lies flat over his face and his features are empty and blissful, serene in that self-satisfied way that one can only be after needlessly antagonizing a sibling; he’s fallen asleep, Thanatos realizes with a stab of horror. He’s fallen asleep, and he’s left Thanatos alone with a heartbeat that’s threatening to split him in two, a dog that’s perpetually on the warpath, and then vague instructions to take that same dog on a _walk_ \- out in _public-_ which feels a little unsafe. And moral ramifications of unleashing a beast onto the unsuspecting city besides, is he really going to risk life and limb hooking the leash onto Ares’s collar so that he can do something that he doesn’t want to do? Is he _really_ going to try and take this dog that hates him with every fiber of his tiny, fluffy body out on a _walk_ just because his brother asked him to?

Yes. Yes he is. He’s already knelt down beside the bag on the floor, leash half in his hand and Ares wriggling at his side and howling in glee at the prospect of a walk. The things he does for family, he thinks mournfully, and then he sets about the hardest task that he’s ever encountered in all of his twenty-five years of life: getting both himself  _ and  _ Ares out the door intact. 

In the end it takes two excruciating minutes full of pleading, a few beneath-the-breath threats, and naturally a little bit of bribery (there is considerably less turkey in his fridge then there was before; he’s going to have to go grocery shopping tomorrow), but soon enough they’re out the door, and then the next thing that Thanatos knows he’s gotten Ares out of the building entirely,  _ without  _ leaving irreparable amounts of property damage in his wake. It’s the little things in life. And things don’t seem as bad now either, now that he’s actually out and about on the bustling streets of the city with Ares’s leash wound several times around his hand, just in case; it’s hot enough that there’s a thin wisp of a sheen over the asphalt and the air seems to be folding in on itself, but that’s just par for the course really. Most everywhere that Thanatos has lived has gotten hot as hell in the warmer months, so he’s come to expect it. Sometimes he even enjoys it. 

Now Ares complicates things, because Ares tries to fight everything that crosses his path: squirrels, joggers, two butterflies, an acorn. And Thanatos may not have the best track record with living things- which are really little more than precarious networks of electrical pulses and hair-thin nerves, all of which he’s a touch too blunt to handle- but  _ this  _ just seems excessive. By the time that Thanatos has steered them over to the nearby park in a split-second decision made after Ares made a beeline for a bakery and nearly sent him sprawling, he’s already exhausted; weak in the knees, forehead slick with sweat, sweatpants stuck to his skin and his skin stuck to his bones. He’s feeling less and less like a person and more a concept, like a vague shift of air that’s been trundled into someone’s secondhand clothing and pawned a dog somewhere along the way. The leash has become unbearably tight around his hand, so much so that it’s digging sharp into the flesh between his thumb and palm, so he takes his eyes off the path for a moment to unwind it which proves to be a big mistake because not a second later he’s hit by a sudden, sinking feeling of dread. 

And, incidentally, a very large dog. 

It bowls him over. Completely, head over heels, leash tangled in his legs and limbs sprawled out everywhere with no rhyme or reason to any of it at all. One of his sneakers has flung itself into a bush, and the right leg of his sweatpants has pushed itself all the way up to his knee, and there’s a smear of dirt running lengthwise down his shin. Ares is trembling in a volatile ball of rage somewhere to his left, and the dog that came out of nowhere is snuffling it’s nose into the side of his head over and over again, breath wet and warm and kind of  _ gross  _ against the side of his neck. Thanatos is able to gather himself enough to sit up, to groan and pull his hand through his hair. He makes sure that he’s still got a hold on Ares’s leash first, and then he swings his head around and gets his first good look at the other dog because what the  _ fuck. _

Now Thanatos doesn’t _dislike_ dogs, and one doesn’t grow up with both Charon and Hypnos without learning a good thing or two about them, but this one isn’t like any he’s ever seen before. It’s a big lump of an animal, with skin pulled taut over muscle and a sharp, pointed face, tongue lolling out of a mouth open wide enough to show off a sharp flash of dangerous-looking teeth. It’s also big. It’s a big dog. _Big_ as in the size of a fire truck or maybe a small elephant, big as in Ares might be the size of one of its paws on a good day, big as in if you were driving down the street and saw someone walking it you would immediately turn to whoever you were with and say _holy fuck that’s a really big dog, holy fuck_ _look at that really big dog._ It is also, inexplicably, wearing a sweater. A fancy black knitted sweater with cables up the sides that’s probably homemade because Thanatos doubts that they make dog sweaters that could fit a fucking tank.

It’s oddly endearing. He’s oddly endeared by the sweater and the size, by the eager, apologetic thump of its tail and the mournful look in its eyes as it nudges its nose into the side of his head in a gesture that’s as sweet as it is gross. Thanatos just sits there and lets it happen as he tries to figure out what he’s supposed to do next- he’s hesitant to pat the dog without the owner there but it’s  _ right there _ , slumped over his leg in a heavy an unmoving weight as it looks at him with its head cocked slightly to the side and breath coming in heavy pants, sides heaving in and out with the effort of it all. It’s got a collar and he’s just decided on reaching out a careful, unsure hand towards that when there’s a shuffle and a shout from his left and then the sound of rapid, frantic footsteps followed by a harried shout. 

“Cerberus!” someone calls, and the dog’s head snaps up.  _ Thump, thump, thump  _ goes its tail- and the ground shakes with every impact- and then it’s up and bounding, leash dragging behind as it barrels towards a man who is making a valiant effort at making his way towards them when his every step is being dogged by- well, by two big, russet red dogs with sharp teeth and big eyes and meticulously made black sweaters. Thanatos blinks and rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand because his head  _ does  _ kind of hurt after that fall and he didn’t  _ think  _ it was that bad but it seems that he’s seeing double or triple or something of that sort, because those two dogs look exactly like the one that just ran him over. 

_ What the fuck,  _ Thanatos thinks, and then he says: “What the  _ fuck _ .”

It’s a little more unsure than he would like, high-pitched and lilted up at the end, but it gets the guy’s attention; either that or the way that Ares is hopping around like a puffball of righteous fury, the pitter-patter of his paws on the ground like a very small, very angry thunderstorm. 

“Oh shit,” the guy says. He takes up the dog’s- Cerberus, Thanatos remembers- leash up into his hand and jogs over, looking properly apologetic at least. “Sorry about that! Cerberus here gets a little excited whenever he sees another dog, and I tried to stop him, but  _ well _ -” He holds up the three leashes in his hand here, pulls a face- “sometimes things get a bit away from me, yeah?”

Thanatos nods. He is not thinking about whatever it is that this guy is saying to him because every bit of consciousness in his head is busy blaring  _ HOT! HOT! HOT!  _ at him in eight-foot tall, fluorescent green letters, and the thing about having all of his thoughts co-opted by this particular faction of his brain is that there isn’t anything left for him to use when he has to do things like actually to  _ talk _ to  _ HOT! HOT! HOT!  _ guy. So in the end Thanatos is only half there because the rest of him is busy trying not to be obvious about the way that he’s looking at the other man’s heavily-muscled arms, at his slightly ruffled and pitch-black hair and his red-orange sneakers and the way that he’s a good few inches shorter than Thanatos. Ares is nipping at his ankles so he pulls them up beneath himself, clambers until he’s sitting and then sort of gently flops a hand against Ares’s head in a halfhearted attempt at placation as he rolls his shoulders out until he starts to feel right again. The guy is looking at him, all at once concerned and looking like he’s about to burst out into laughter.

“Is he yours?” he asks, gesturing down at Ares.

“What?” says Thanatos, who does not know what is happening and whose personal experience with owning pets begins and ends with him thinking that he’d maybe, possibly like to have a cat someday. “What? I think. Maybe. Yes.”

And that sounds right for all of ten seconds, and then his brain comes crashing back into him and Thanatos is struck dumb for a moment by his own stupidity. And the worst thing about all this- and the worst thing about a lie like this in general, one that he didn’t mean to tell- is that he’s only got a short window of time to correct himself before it becomes  _ weird,  _ and he can’t exactly look  _ weird  _ in front of the hot guy, now can he? So he opens his mouth to set things straight, but then he closes it again because he isn’t quite sure what he’s meant to say, and then he opens it again and wills himself to speak but by now his opportunity has long since slid away and he can already feel himself slipping neck-deep into accidental deception.

He panics. Then he panics some more because the guy’s reached out and Thanatos is only half-aware as to how he got here but as it is he’s grasping wide-eyed at the outstretched hand of a stranger so that he can be hoisted up, trying to brush the gravel from where it’s embedded into his skin and keeping a death grip on Ares’s leash all the while because the _last_ thing that he needs is for that dog to get loose. He’s standing up straight now, clearing his throat several times and looking down at the guy and his three weirdly identical dogs and not saying a word to correct his earlier (completely _reasonable_ , this shouldn’t be as difficult as it is) slip of the tongue; here he is not saying anything at all because he’s suddenly remembered that between his shoes and sweatpants and sweatshirt he’s got on three different shades of gray and that’s not the best outfit for first impressions is it?

When it becomes clear that he is not going to be able to correct himself, he tries instead to force his mouth into a smile to match the easy grin that the (even hotter now that he can actually see him face to face, all sharp angles and strong lines and striking eyes, one of which is a sharp green and the other the sort of broken brown-gold that looks reddish in the right light) stranger’s got on. It comes out as more of a grimace so he does away with that smile and instead gestures weakly to the three identical dogs, which are bounding and lunging at each other in turn in what seems to be celebration of the recovery of a third of their party. 

“Yours, then?” he says, trying to keep it casual, trying to keep it cool. The end result is somewhere between disaffected and uninterested which isn’t  _ great,  _ but it’s better than the high-pitched panic characteristic of Trying To Talk To Hot Guy. 

“Yeah!” the guy replies, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “This here is Cerberus, though I guess you already know that.”

He gestures vaguely to the dogs as a whole before reaching down to scratch one behind the ears. The other two paw at his legs in a slobbery, lathering mess of  _ dog-  _ gods, there are so many  _ dogs _ \- until he pats them as well, circling through all three with a practiced ease. As for Thanatos- Thanatos is confused. This is no surprise. 

“Which one?” he asks anyways, first because it seems appropriate and second because he may be confused at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that he has to  _ stay  _ that way. 

“Yes,” the guy says, and then busies himself with patting his dogs again. He does not elaborate. 

But Thanatos has seen stranger things in his time so he shakes it off, resolves to let it slide off his back and thud to the ground where Ares can prod and growl at it all he’d like. And then he fails at this and just sort of stares, mindless and empty-headed at the three dogs as they clamber and climb over one another and the guy stands there as still and staunch as a watchtower, perfectly content with patting whichever dog it is that pushes their head up into his hand whenever they want some attention. Thanatos thinks that he really ought to put an end to this right now, immediately because he can already feel himself forming one of those ten-minute crushes and the whole thing is a little too embarrassing for him to stand. Best to get out while he still can, while he’s still got some of his pride intact; best to get out before he does something stupid, like fall again or get tripped up by Ares or make a complete and utter fool of himself for no real reason. 

“I’m Zagreus,” the guy-  _ Zagreus- _ says, putting an end to that line of thought. He holds out a hand which Thanatos takes with no small amount of trepidation- better safe than sorry- but they manage to execute a handshake without bringing about the end times, so mission accomplished. 

“Thanatos,” he replies. “This is Ares.”

He gestures at Ares, who is staring down Cerberus and practically vibrating with anticipatory rage, tail twitching rapidly from side to side as he whirs out some high-pitched noise that might be a growl and might be a bark, it’s not really clear. Cerberus stops immediately- all of them- and turns to look at him. 

“He’s a bit of a fighter,” Thanatos adds, because Zagreus seems to know a thing or two about dogs and gods know that if something breaks out then Thanatos is counting on him to know how to stop it. 

Ares takes a few trembling steps towards Cerberus, and then he’s off and yapping away but not in an  _ angry  _ way (Thanatos didn’t even know that that was possible for him) and Cerberus is barking back in a much lower, softer manner, and against all odds they seem to be getting  _ along,  _ or else as much as Ares can get along with other living things. Wonders never do cease, do they?

“They seem to like each other,” Zagreus comments, all good humor. He smiles again and Thanatos coughs, looks away. He is really only capable of dealing with so much in one day and he stumbled up and over his limit the minute that he walked out of his apartment door. 

“They do,” he says, and then nothing else. He thinks that there may be a tear in his sleeve so he tries to look at it without drawing attention to the fact that he thinks that there may be a tear in his sleeve, because Zagreus may have seen him get knocked over by a dog and be vaguely intimidated by what supposedly was his own pomeranian but Zagreus seeing that there may be a tear in his sleeve is a little too much, apparently. Thanatos has never pretended to know what sort of logic his brain likes to employ and he’s not about to start now. 

They stand there for a moment more, watching Cerberus nose at Ares and Ares flail and bark in the way that he flails and barks when he doesn’t hate everything about whoever it is that he’s interacting with; Thanatos has really only ever seen him like this with Hypnos. It feels unreal, and between Ares’s newfound civility and the froth of white-hot clouds looping across the sky, between the sluggish movements of the other joggers in the park and Zagreus where he stands front-and-center and in full focus, Thanatos feels a little dizzy. He may also be a touch dehydrated but that’s not nearly as romantic so he’s elected to ignore it for the time being. 

“I’ve got to get back to my run,” Zagreus starts, and it might just be Thanatos’s imagination (or he might just be projecting) but he swears that there’s a bit of regret in his voice. “But it seems a bit of a shame to put an end to a friendship before it’s got a real chance to get off the ground, yeah?”

Thanatos does not know if he is talking about them or the dogs. Thanatos does not know if it would be appropriate for him to ask because Thanatos’s ideas of how things like this work are formed largely from television and then a whole lot of observation, and that works well enough but his strategies tend to leave strange gaps in his knowledge, the sort that creep up on him and then make themselves known inelegantly with no warning at all. He does not know how to navigate this,  _ this  _ being hot people and split-second attraction and days that don’t feel real and dogs whose behavior changes on a dime. He should’ve taken a page out of Hypnos’s book and taken a nap instead. 

“How about this then,” Zagreus, and then he reaches into the pocket of his (bright red) basketball shorts and pulls out a pen. Then he makes a strange mess of a gesture that’s something like a wink and something like a shrug in a somewhat sheepish acknowledgement that yes, carrying a pen in the pocket of your workout clothing is strange and no, he is not going to explain. He makes a bit of a show out of patting down his other pockets before coming up with a scrap of a receipt and scratching out his number with a flourish. 

“Here. So we can find a time for these guys to meet up again.”   
  


He gestures at the dogs and well, that answers that question. But then he pushes the paper into Thanatos’s hand and their hands brush for a moment, the sort of heart-stopping second that turns the afternoon inside-out and then spins it around and spits it back out and leaves the whole world pattering on as usual like nothing happened at all. He’s warm; he’s warm, and Thanatos is as cold as a corpse. 

“That sounds nice,” he finds himself saying by the grace of some hidden part of his brain that would rather that he not completely screw this up, thank you, and then Zagreus nods so Thanatos nods, and the world moves around them like the slow swell of the sea or a breath taken low, from the stomach. He takes a moment to disentangle Ares from where he’s hopping around the big mass of dog that makes up Cerberus, and then Zagreus gives him one last wave and just like that he’s off. Running down the path again, Cerberus’s leashes caught up in his hands and sneakers hitting one-two-one-two against the faded concrete. Thanatos watches until he the bend and he can’t watch him any longer, and then he looks down at the slip of paper in his hand, disbelief and grade-school giddiness warring away in his mess of a brain. Hypnos is never going to let him live this one down, he thinks. Then again, it might be worth it. 

But he can’t help but feel with a creeping, crawling sense of dread that he must be forgetting something crucial, something important that shaped that interaction, something that moved it along and let it end as it did, something that’s going to come back to bite him in the ass. 

Or the leg to his sweatpants _ ,  _ as it were. 

“ _ FUCK _ ,” Thanatos hisses as he throws himself towards the ground and does his damndest to detach Ares from where he’s got his teeth locked into the fabric around his ankles. “ _ Shit,  _ get  _ off  _ of me, fuck-” 

He manages to wrangle him off, and then they’re at a standstill; Ares, heaving breath from his tiny little lungs, Thanatos hearing his own voice playing back on loop inside of his head saying that  _ yes,  _ Ares is  _ his  _ dog and therefore implying that he’d be both able and open to- mutual walks? Dog play dates? He doesn’t actually know. But it’s  _ much  _ too late to correct himself now, and he really would like to see Zagreus again so his course of action is painfully, woefully clear. With no small amount of trepidation he reaches down to scoop Ares up and then he lifts him- slowly, slowly- until they’re looking each other in the eye. Ares yelps and wriggles, glaring down at him with his beady black eyes. 

“Well,” Thanatos says, soft and solemn. Ares does a valiant job of trying to gnaw his thumb off. “It looks like you and I are going to be seeing quite a bit more of each other.”    
  


And then Ares manages to latch his jaw around his sleeve, and suddenly Thanatos is too busy trying to detach him to say anything else at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!
> 
> Also, more notes on this particular au:
> 
> Yes, Zagreus was hitting on Thanatos. No, Thanatos does not realize for another month. Yes, at some point during that month Thanatos works up the nerve to start openly flirting with Zagreus. No, Zagreus does not realize. Idiots to lovers. 
> 
> Cerberus is three very similar looking dogs. Zagreus is the only one able to tell them apart and they’re always together anyways so most people just refer to them as one big entity. The sweaters started as an attempt for others to be able to tell them apart, but when that failed the sweaters continued because dogs in sweaters are adorable. 
> 
> Zagreus used to work for his father’s company in one of those huge glass skyscrapers. One day he quit- very loudly, very publicly, in his father’s office which he’d never really been in before- and proceeded to get lost several times trying to find the exit. For some reason, he kept ending up right back where he started, but he eventually managed to find his way out (with plenty of help) and now works at his mother’s flower shop. He later refers to this incident as his escape from corporate hell.
> 
> I’m not entirely sure what Thanatos does so he’s not entirely sure either, but by god if he doesn’t _do_ it. Something with numbers, something with letters, words if he’s lucky and other people if he’s not. If asked about it he tends to just gesture wildly and say something smart-sounding but ultimately meaningless about stocks which works surprisingly well for his purposes, which often boil down to getting out of the conversation as soon as possible
> 
> Hypnos works as a receptionist for Hades’s ambiguous corporate office. Ares was named after one of his coworkers solely to cause drama, and it was intended to be a joke but it stuck and now Hypnos gladly tells the story to anyone who asks and anyone who doesn’t ask and anyone who acknowledges that he has a dog at all, whether they’re a close friend or a stranger on the street. He’s a big hit at parties and as a general rule he knows exactly what he’s doing


End file.
